Life for your run Saturday, Jul 26 2008 

opinion reuche 9:00 pm

Something I was thinking about last time but forgot in the midst of melodrama was that there are certain exercises which might save your life if you are proficient in them.

The three that come to mind are swimming, running, and climbing. I think that swimming is pretty obvious, although it is less important in totally landlocked or frozen areas. I always thought swimming was really good exercise as well. As to running, it never hurts to be able to get  far the hell away from something as fast as possible. And with climbing the main idea is being able to lift your body up over a ledge that you are clinging to “for dear life”. I think that drowning and falling are still relatively common ways to die and perhaps if you are better at swimming and climbing you won’t die that way, or you will avoid more serious injuries perhaps.

Honestly I was initially thinking chin-ups which I am now unable to do rather than climbing (which I also am unlikely to be able to do anymore but it doesn’t come up much in the city), and there is some transfer as far as muscular training goes. And a fire escape is more similar to a chin-up bar than a mountain face but nonetheless. if you can go from clinging with your finger tips to hoisting yourself over something then you will be in ideal upper body condition. I bet guys who can do that can lift over 100 kilos, at least 50 for women.

If you want to be able to save someone else’s life then being able to carry weight equivalent to a person for a certain distance is probably the main thing, followed by being able to lift heavy mass off people. In theory with the right locations and levers and sleds you can make up for physical strength with physics but in reality you will often find yourself lacking for a good lever at the scene of a car crash or avalanche.

When did I become a survivalist? Who the hell knows but I’ve made it this far.

 

when there isn’t anything good to say you might as well say something bad to fill up space Saturday, Jul 26 2008 

death and math and opinion and personal and philosophy , , , , , , reuche 9:54 am

I suppose that is how I’ve lived my life, and so in that spirit I will write about something that likely has only incidental effects on anything else in the world.

Today I found that I no longer possess the strength to do a “chin-up” exercise, I could barely even hold myself up, I think just hanging there I strained my abdomen of all places. Coupled with my other physical degradations (have you seen my mention cycling recently? how often do you see me mention doing anything physical? this is why) I can only view this as the beginning of the end. I am not surprised by this, ever since I lost my full range of motion I knew that things would never be good again for me physically. But I didn’t think this is how my life would play out.

I lived through quite a bit and it definitely took its toll on me. Now standing here facing my own mortality I can reflect on how lucky I was to make it this far, how much I really did see that can never be put into words or communicated to another person. My odyssey was my own and it must be fated to remain that way. There are a lot of things I wish I had done, that I doubt I’ll ever get around to at this point. Most of them are silly little things, of no consequence, and so I am left with only one regret. I won’t be leaving anything behind. In a way this is the ideal state to be in for death, to have nothing encumbering you. Oh certainly there will be people, and there are the things I’ve accumulated over the years, but only now do I appreciate how little that all means.

Maybe that is just me. I have always been a sort of absolutist, a perfectionist, and my curse was to be that way but remain incompetent and curious. Really it has been a miserable life. If only I had let myself be more easy going when I was a child perhaps life would have been more fun. Then again it is not as if I had anything to do with the beginning of the Holocaust. Perhaps after that a pall was just cast over the entire last century and I ended out bearing a large brunt of it. I can’t tell you. But it is a strange thing. I think if I would only change one thing about it all is that I’d have just died as a child instead of living this whole way. If I could have died while I was still innocent of the world…

But I did not. I lived until this point and in all likelihood there are two or three, perhaps even five if I would go see a doctor, years left for me to be a twisted person. I’ll never know if I was just born this way or if my experiences made me become what I am today. It probably doesn’t even matter that much.

As to how I plan to spend the rest of my life, at least for now I will continue making my way through math. I have already gotten quite sick of it since I will never be able to do anything of consequence with it at this point. But learning math is as good of a way to spend your time while dying slowly as any don’t you think? I suppose some might joke that to learn math is to die slowly. Or at that rate that the proper learning of math is dying out slowly. But perhaps that is just the way it is.

Until then.